Optimization of Stealthwatch Network Security System for the Detection and Mitigation of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attack: Application to Smart Grid System

The Smart Grid is an enhancement of the traditional grid system and employs new technologies and sophisticated communication techniques for electrical power transmission and distribution. The Smart Grid’s communication network shares information about status of its several integrated IEDs (Intelligent Electronic Devices). However, the IEDs connected throughout the Smart Grid, open opportunities for attackers to interfere with the communications and utilities resources or take clients’ private data. This development has introduced new cyber-security challenges for the Smart Grid and is a very concerning issue because of emerging cyber-threats and security incidents that have occurred recently all over the world. The purpose of this research is to detect and mitigate Distributed Denial of Service [DDoS] with application to the Electrical Smart Grid System by deploying an optimized Stealthwatch Secure Network analytics tool. In this paper, the DDoS attack in the Smart Grid communication networks was modeled using Stealthwatch tool. The simulated network consisted of Secure Network Analytic tools virtual machines (VMs), electrical Grid network communication topology, attackers and Target VMs. Finally, the experiments and simulations were performed, and the research results showed that Stealthwatch analytic tool is very effective in detecting and mitigating DDoS attacks in the Smart Grid System without causing any blackout or shutdown of any internal systems as compared to other tools such as GNS3, NeSSi2, NISST Framework, OMNeT++, INET Framework, ReaSE, NS2, NS3, M5 Simulator, OPNET, PLC & TIA Portal management Software which do not have the capability to do so. Also, using Stealthwatch tool to create a security baseline for Smart Grid environment, contributes to risk mitigation and sound security hygiene.

The History, Trend, Types, and Mitigation of Distributed Denial of Service Attacks

Over time, the world has transformed digitally and there is total dependence on the internet. Many more gadgets are continuously interconnected in the internet ecosystem. This fact has made the Internet a global information source for every being. Despite all this, attacker knowledge by cybercriminals has advanced and resulted in different attack methodologies on the internet and its data stores. This paper will discuss the origin and significance of Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). These kinds of attacks remain the most effective methods used by the bad guys to cause substantial damage in terms of operational, reputational, and financial damage to organizations globally. These kinds of attacks have hindered network performance and availability. The victim’s network is flooded with massive illegal traffic hence, denying genuine traffic from passing through for authorized users. The paper will explore detection mechanisms, and mitigation techniques for this network threat.

Formalized Description of Distributed Denial of Service Attack

The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is one of the dangers in intrusion modes. It's difficult to defense and can cause serious damage to the system. Based on a careful study of the attack principles and characteristics, an object-oriented formalized description is presented, which contains a three-level framework and offers full specifications of all kinds of DDoS modes and their features and the relations between one another. Its greatest merit lies in that it contributes to analyzing, checking and judging DDoS. Now this formalized description has been used in a special IDS and it works very effectively.(

Denial of Service Due to Direct and Indirect ARP Storm Attacks in LAN Environment

ARP-based Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks due to ARP-storms can happen in local area networks where many computer systems are infected by worms such as Code Red or by DDoS agents. In ARP attack, the DDoS agents constantly send a barrage of ARP requests to the gateway, or to a victim computer within the same sub-network, and tie up the resource of attacked gateway or host. In this paper, we set to measure the impact of ARP-attack on resource exhaustion of computers in a local area network. Based on attack experiments, we measure the exhaustion of processing and memory resources of a victim computer and also other computers, which are located on the same network as the victim computer. Interestingly enough, it is observed that an ARP-attack not only exhausts resource of the victim computer but also significantly exhausts processing resource of other non-victim computers, which happen to be located on the same local area network as the victim computer.

Modeling and Simulation of Low Rate of Denial of Service Attacks

The low-rate denial of service attack is more applicable to the network in recent years as a means of attack, which is different from the traditional field type DoS attacks at the network end system or network using adaptive mechanisms exist loopholes flow through the low-rate periodic attacks on the implementation of high-efficiency attacked by an intruder and not be found, resulting in loss of user data or a computer deadlock. LDos attack since there has been extensive attention of researchers, the attack signature analysis and detection methods to prevent network security have become an important research topic. Some have been proposed for the current attacks were classified LDoS describe and model, and then in NS-2 platform for experimental verification, and then LDoS attack detection to prevent difficulties are discussed and summarized for the future such attacks detection method research work to provide a reference.

Dynamic Threshold-Based Approach to Detect Low-Rate DDoS Attacks on Software-Defined Networking Controller

The emergence of a new network architecture,known as Software Defined Networking(SDN),in the last two decades has overcome some drawbacks of traditional networks in terms of performance,scalability,reliability,security,and network management.However,the SDN is vulnerable to security threats that target its controller,such as low-rate Distributed Denial of Service(DDoS)attacks,The low-rate DDoS attack is one of the most prevalent attacks that poses a severe threat to SDN network security because the controller is a vital architecture component.Therefore,there is an urgent need to propose a detection approach for this type of attack with a high detection rate and low false-positive rates.Thus,this paper proposes an approach to detect low-rate DDoS attacks on the SDN controller by adapting a dynamic threshold.The proposed approach has been evaluated using four simulation scenarios covering a combination of low-rate DDoS attacks against the SDN controller involving(i)a single host attack targeting a single victim;(ii)a single host attack targeting multiple victims;(iii)multiple hosts attack targeting a single victim;and(iv)multiple hosts attack targeting multiple victims.The proposed approach’s average detection rates are 96.65%,91.83%,96.17%,and 95.33%for the above scenarios,respectively;and its average false-positive rates are 3.33%,8.17%,3.83%,and 4.67%for similar scenarios,respectively.The comparison between the proposed approach and two existing approaches showed that it outperformed them in both categories.

Game-theoretical Model for Dynamic Defense Resource Allocation in Cyber-physical Power Systems Under Distributed Denial of Service Attacks

Electric power grids are evolving into complex cyber-physical power systems(CPPSs)that integrate advanced information and communication technologies(ICTs)but face increasing cyberspace threats and attacks.This study considers CPPS cyberspace security under distributed denial of service(DDoS)attacks and proposes a nonzero-sum game-theoretical model with incomplete information for appropriate allocation of defense resources based on the availability of limited resources.Task time delay is applied to quantify the expected utility as CPPSs have high time requirements and incur massive damage DDoS attacks.Different resource allocation strategies are adopted by attackers and defenders under the three cases of attack-free,failed attack,and successful attack,which lead to a corresponding consumption of resources.A multidimensional node value analysis is designed to introduce physical and cybersecurity indices.Simulation experiments and numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model for the appropriate allocation of defense resources in CPPSs under limited resource availability.

Mitigating while Accessing:A Lightweight Defense Framework Against Link Flooding Attacks in SDN

Link flooding attack(LFA)is a type of covert distributed denial of service(DDoS)attack.The attack mechanism of LFAs is to flood critical links within the network to cut off the target area from the Internet.Recently,the proliferation of Internet of Things(IoT)has increased the quantity of vulnerable devices connected to the network and has intensified the threat of LFAs.In LFAs,attackers typically utilize low-speed flows that do not reach the victims,making the attack difficult to detect.Traditional LFA defense methods mainly reroute the attack traffic around the congested link,which encounters high complexity and high computational overhead due to the aggregation of massive attack traffic.To address these challenges,we present an LFA defense framework which can mitigate the attack flows at the border switches when they are small in scale.This framework is lightweight and can be deployed at border switches of the network in a distributed manner,which ensures the scalability of our defense system.The performance of our framework is assessed in an experimental environment.The simulation results indicate that our method is effective in detecting and mitigating LFAs with low time complexity.

Threshold-Based Software-Defined Networking(SDN)Solution for Healthcare Systems against Intrusion Attacks

The healthcare sector holds valuable and sensitive data.The amount of this data and the need to handle,exchange,and protect it,has been increasing at a fast pace.Due to their nature,software-defined networks(SDNs)are widely used in healthcare systems,as they ensure effective resource utilization,safety,great network management,and monitoring.In this sector,due to the value of thedata,SDNs faceamajor challengeposed byawide range of attacks,such as distributed denial of service(DDoS)and probe attacks.These attacks reduce network performance,causing the degradation of different key performance indicators(KPIs)or,in the worst cases,a network failure which can threaten human lives.This can be significant,especially with the current expansion of portable healthcare that supports mobile and wireless devices for what is called mobile health,or m-health.In this study,we examine the effectiveness of using SDNs for defense against DDoS,as well as their effects on different network KPIs under various scenarios.We propose a threshold-based DDoS classifier(TBDC)technique to classify DDoS attacks in healthcare SDNs,aiming to block traffic considered a hazard in the form of a DDoS attack.We then evaluate the accuracy and performance of the proposed TBDC approach.Our technique shows outstanding performance,increasing the mean throughput by 190.3%,reducing the mean delay by 95%,and reducing packet loss by 99.7%relative to normal,with DDoS attack traffic.

The detection method of low-rate DoS attack based on multi-feature fusion

As a new type of Denial of Service(DoS)attacks,the Low-rate Denial of Service(LDoS)attacks make the traditional method of detecting Distributed Denial of Service Attack(DDoS)attacks useless due to the characteristics of a low average rate and concealment.With features extracted from the network traffic,a new detection approach based on multi-feature fusion is proposed to solve the problem in this paper.An attack feature set containing the Acknowledge character(ACK)sequence number,the packet size,and the queue length is used to classify normal and LDoS attack traffics.Each feature is digitalized and preprocessed to fit the input of the K-Nearest Neighbor(KNN)classifier separately,and to obtain the decision contour matrix.Then a posteriori probability in the matrix is fused,and the fusion decision index D is used as the basis of detecting the LDoS attacks.Experiments proved that the detection rate of the multi-feature fusion algorithm is higher than those of the single-based detection method and other algorithms.

Iterative Dichotomiser Posteriori Method Based Service Attack Detection in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing(CC)is an advanced technology that provides access to predictive resources and data sharing.The cloud environment represents the right type regarding cloud usage model ownership,size,and rights to access.It introduces the scope and nature of cloud computing.In recent times,all processes are fed into the system for which consumer data and cache size are required.One of the most security issues in the cloud environment is Distributed Denial of Ser-vice(DDoS)attacks,responsible for cloud server overloading.This proposed sys-tem ID3(Iterative Dichotomiser 3)Maximum Multifactor Dimensionality Posteriori Method(ID3-MMDP)is used to overcome the drawback and a rela-tively simple way to execute and for the detection of(DDoS)attack.First,the pro-posed ID3-MMDP method calls for the resources of the cloud platform and then implements the attack detection technology based on information entropy to detect DDoS attacks.Since because the entropy value can show the discrete or aggregated characteristics of the current data set,it can be used for the detection of abnormal dataflow,User-uploaded data,ID3-MMDP system checks and read risk measurement and processing,bug ratingfile size changes,orfile name changes and changes in the format design of the data size entropy value.Unique properties can be used whenever the program approaches any data error to detect abnormal data services.Finally,the experiment also verifies the DDoS attack detection capability algorithm.

A Novel Framework for DDoS Attacks Detection Using Hybrid LSTM Techniques

The recent development of cloud computing offers various services on demand for organization and individual users,such as storage,shared computing space,networking,etc.Although Cloud Computing provides various advantages for users,it remains vulnerable to many types of attacks that attract cyber criminals.Distributed Denial of Service(DDoS)is the most common type of attack on cloud computing.Consequently,Cloud computing professionals and security experts have focused on the growth of preventive processes towards DDoS attacks.Since DDoS attacks have become increasingly widespread,it becomes difficult for some DDoS attack methods based on individual network flow features to distinguish various types of DDoS attacks.Further,the monitoring pattern of traffic changes and accurate detection of DDoS attacks are most important and urgent.In this research work,DDoS attack detection methods based on deep belief network feature extraction and Hybrid Long Short-Term Memory(LSTM)model have been proposed with NSL-KDD dataset.In Hybrid LSTM method,the Particle Swarm Optimization(PSO)technique,which is combined to optimize the weights of the LSTM neural network,reduces the prediction error.This deep belief network method is used to extract the features of IP packets,and it identifies DDoS attacks based on PSO-LSTM model.Moreover,it accurately predicts normal network traffic and detects anomalies resulting from DDoS attacks.The proposed PSO-LSTM architecture outperforms the classification techniques including standard Support Vector Machine(SVM)and LSTM in terms of attack detection performance along with the results of the measurement of accuracy,recall,f-measure,precision.

Experimental Evaluation of Juniper Network's Netscreen-5GT Security Device against Layer4 Flood Attacks

Cyber attacks are continuing to hamper working of Internet services despite increased use of network secu-rity systems such as firewalls and Intrusion protection systems (IPS). Recent Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on Dec 8th, 2010 by Wikileak supporters on Visa and Master Card websites made headlines on prime news channels all over the world. Another famous DDoS attacks on Independence Day weekend, on July 4th, 2009 were launched to debilitate the US and South Korean governments’ websites. These attacks raised questions about the capabilities of the security systems that were used in the network to counteract such attacks. Firewall and IPS security systems are commonly used today as a front line defense mechanism to defend against DDoS attacks. In many deployments, performances of these security devices are seldom evaluated for their effectiveness. Different security devices perform differently in stopping DDoS attacks. In this paper, we intend to drive the point that it is important to evaluate the capability of Firewall or IPS secu-rity devices before they are deployed to protect a network or a server against DDoS attacks. In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of a security device called Netscreen 5GT (or NS-5GT) from Juniper Networks under Layer-4 flood attacks at different attack loads. This security device NS-5GT comes with a feature called TCP-SYN proxy protection to protect against TCP-SYN based DDoS attacks, and UDP protection feature to protect against UDP flood attacks. By looking at these security features from the equipments data sheet, one might assume the device to protect the network against such DDoS attacks. In this paper, we con-ducted real experiments to measure the performance of this security device NS-5GT under the TCP SYN and UDP flood attacks and test the performance of these protection features. It was found that the Juniper’s NS-5GT mitigated the effect of DDoS traffic to some extent especially when the attack of lower intensity. However, the device was unable to provide any protection against Layer4 flood attacks when the load ex-ceeded 40Mbps. In order to guarantee a measured level of security, it is important for the network managers to measure the actual capabilities of a security device, using real attack traffic, before they are deployed to protect a critical information infrastructure.

Entropy-Based Approach to Detect DDoS Attacks on Software Defined Networking Controller

The Software-Defined Networking(SDN)technology improves network management over existing technology via centralized network control.The SDN provides a perfect platform for researchers to solve traditional network’s outstanding issues.However,despite the advantages of centralized control,concern about its security is rising.The more traditional network switched to SDN technology,the more attractive it becomes to malicious actors,especially the controller,because it is the network’s brain.A Distributed Denial of Service(DDoS)attack on the controller could cripple the entire network.For that reason,researchers are always looking for ways to detect DDoS attacks against the controller with higher accuracy and lower false-positive rate.This paper proposes an entropy-based approach to detect low-rate and high-rate DDoS attacks against the SDN controller,regardless of the number of attackers or targets.The proposed approach generalized the Rényi joint entropy for analyzing the network traffic flow to detect DDoS attack traffic flow of varying rates.Using two packet header features and generalized Rényi joint entropy,the proposed approach achieved a better detection rate than the EDDSC approach that uses Shannon entropy metrics.

Vulnerability Assessment of Distributed Load Shedding Algorithm for Active Distribution Power System Under Denial of Service Attack

In order to deal with frequency deviation andsupply-demand imbalance in active distribution power system, inthis paper a distributed under frequency load shedding (UFLS)strategy is proposed. Different from conventional centralizedUFLS schemes, no centralized master station gathering all thebuses’ information is required. Instead, each bus decides itsown load shedding amount by only relying on limited peer-topeer communication. However, such UFLS strategy may sufferfrom some unexpected cyber-attacks such as integrity attacksand denial of service (DoS) attack. The latter DoS attack aimsto degrade the system performance by jamming or breakingthe communication, which is of high probability to happen inpractical power system. To assess the vulnerability of proposeddistributed UFLS algorithm, the effect of DoS attack on distributed average consensus algorithm is theoretically derived,which indicates that the final consensus value can be estimatedby a given attack probability. It is also investigated that such DoSattack does harm to the load shedding amount and finally affectsthe system frequency performance in the active distributionpower system. Several case studies implemented on an IEEE33-bus active distribution power system are conducted to verifythe effectiveness of the theoretical findings and investigate thevulnerability of the considered power system.

Detecting and Mitigating DDOS Attacks in SDNs Using Deep Neural Network

Distributed denial of service(DDoS)attack is the most common attack that obstructs a network and makes it unavailable for a legitimate user.We proposed a deep neural network(DNN)model for the detection of DDoS attacks in the Software-Defined Networking(SDN)paradigm.SDN centralizes the control plane and separates it from the data plane.It simplifies a network and eliminates vendor specification of a device.Because of this open nature and centralized control,SDN can easily become a victim of DDoS attacks.We proposed a supervised Developed Deep Neural Network(DDNN)model that can classify the DDoS attack traffic and legitimate traffic.Our Developed Deep Neural Network(DDNN)model takes a large number of feature values as compared to previously proposed Machine Learning(ML)models.The proposed DNN model scans the data to find the correlated features and delivers high-quality results.The model enhances the security of SDN and has better accuracy as compared to previously proposed models.We choose the latest state-of-the-art dataset which consists of many novel attacks and overcomes all the shortcomings and limitations of the existing datasets.Our model results in a high accuracy rate of 99.76%with a low false-positive rate and 0.065%low loss rate.The accuracy increases to 99.80%as we increase the number of epochs to 100 rounds.Our proposed model classifies anomalous and normal traffic more accurately as compared to the previously proposed models.It can handle a huge amount of structured and unstructured data and can easily solve complex problems.

Evaluation of Microsoft Windows Servers 2008 &2003 against Cyber Attacks

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is known to compromise availability of Information Systems today. Widely deployed Microsoft’s Windows 2003 & 2008 servers provide some built-in protection against common Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, such as TCP/SYN attack. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of built-in protection capabilities of Windows servers 2003 & 2008 against a special case of TCP/SYN based DDoS attack. Based on our measurements, it was found that the built-in security features which are available by default on Microsoft’s Windows servers were not sufficient in defending against the TCP/SYN attacks even at low intensity attack traffic. Under TCP/SYN attack traffic, the Microsoft 2003 server was found to crash due to processor resource exhaustion, whereas the 2008 server was found to crash due to its memory resource depletion even at low intensity attack traffic.

DDoS Attack Detection Scheme Based on Entropy and PSO-BP Neural Network in SDN

SDN (Software Defined Network) has many security problems, and DDoS attack is undoubtedly the most serious harm to SDN architecture network. How to accurately and effectively detect DDoS attacks has always been a difficult point and focus of SDN security research. Based on the characteristics of SDN, a DDoS attack detection method combining generalized entropy and PSOBP neural network is proposed. The traffic is pre-detected by the generalized entropy method deployed on the switch, and the detection result is divided into normal and abnormal. Locate the switch that issued the abnormal alarm. The controller uses the PSO-BP neural network to detect whether a DDoS attack occurs by further extracting the flow features of the abnormal switch. Experiments show that compared with other methods, the detection accurate rate is guaranteed while the CPU load of the controller is reduced, and the detection capability is better.

McAfee SecurityCenter Evaluation under DDoS Attack Traffic

During the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, computers are made to attack other computers. Newer Firewalls now days are providing prevention against such attack traffics. McAfee SecurityCenter Firewall is one of the most popular security software installed on millions of Internet connected computers worldwide. “McAfee claims that if you have installed McAfee SecurityCentre with anti-virus and antispyware and Firewall then you always have the most current security to combat the ever-evolving threats on the Internet for the duration of the subscription”. In this paper, we present our findings regarding the effectiveness of McAfee SecurityCentre software against some of the popular Distributed Denial Of Service (DDoS) attacks, namely ARP Flood, Ping-flood, ICMP Land, TCP-SYN Flood and UDP Flood attacks on the computer which has McAfee SecurityCentre installed. The McAfee SecurityCentre software has an in built firewall which can be activated to control and filter the Inbound/Outbound traffic. It can also block the Ping Requests in order to stop or subside the Ping based DDoS Attacks. To test the McAfee Security Centre software, we created the corresponding attack traffic in a controlled lab environment. It was found that the McAfee Firewall software itself was incurring DoS (Denial of Service) by completely exhausting the available memory resources of the host computer during its operation to stop the external DDoS Attacks.

基于CNN-BiLSTM的ICMPv6 DDoS攻击检测方法

针对ICMPv6网络中DDoS攻击检测问题,提出一种基于CNN-BiLSTM网络的检测算法。通过将带有注意力机制、DropConnect和Dropout混合使用加入到CNN-BiLSTM算法中,防止在训练过程中产生的过拟合问题,同时更准确地提取数据的特性数据。通过实验表明:提出的算法在多次实验中的检测准确率、误报率与漏报率平均值分别为92.84%、4.49%和10.54%,检测算法泛化性较强,性能由于其他算法,能够有效处理ICMPv6 DDoS攻击检测问题。